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[quote=Anonymous]Good heavens, the back and forth on this is exhausting.

The SAT and ACT are content-knowledge exams. They are designed to test whether or not you know how to solve the problems that are presented to you. The problems are in most cases reasonably advanced and so it is an exam that largely tests your level of advancement in certain content areas.

The Quant-Q is NOT a content-knowledge exam. It is a problem-solving exam. I've said this approximately a thousand times on this forum, but its entire purpose is to present students with problems of types that they're unlikely to have seen before and evaluate their ability to develop a solution on the fly.

The questions are fairly challenging if you have never seen the problem types before. But if someone has shown them to you previously, they are staggeringly easy in most cases. Allowing students to prepare for an exam like the Quant-Q not only makes it worthless, it makes it obscurative to the admissions process and invites admitting the WRONG kids. So why use an exam like this?

Native problem-solving ability tracks well with innovation, which is the broad purpose of STEM disciplines. There is obviously some limited value in bringing in kids who are advanced in STEM but whose ceilings are limited to doing things other people have already done - but there is obviously much greater value in sending kids to TJ who have the ability to develop solutions to problems on their own.

The Quant-Q is perfect for sussing out that ability, and it was destroyed in its use for TJ by programs like Curie, which taught kids how to do the types of problems that are found on the exam. There's probably not a good solution to this problem, because no matter what type of exam you use, you're going to engage with the multi-million dollar industry for getting kids into TJ.

Any solution has to be significantly opaque and must prioritize actively seeking kids who have different goals, aims, priorities, and backgrounds so as to limit the impact of parent investment in the process.[/quote]

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